Two Sentence-ish Sometimes-Horror Reviews (Part 2)

I’ve been writing reviews for a month or so now and have yet to get out of my December reading. In an effort to catch up. I’m just going to do batches of one or two sentence reviews. Given that I read two-three books a week, I’d otherwise just be a skeleton typing things 400 years from now like some Muir protagonist. 

The Witch of Willow Hall by Hester Fox*: 3.5. Banished from Boston as a result of a horrible rumor about her sister, Lydia is just trying to live her life with superpowers when she meets her Mr. McHotty. It’s not a deep read, but a little something angsty to add to my cotton candy endings doesn’t have to be.

Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak: 3.5. Is the nanny crazy, she’s fresh out of rehab; is the kid creepy, he’s seeing ghosts and drawing like someone many times his age; or are the parents simply too indulging, Teddy has a thousand rules and little freedom? It’s a modern take on a Gothic trope, with a ghost that gave me a fear of cottages for at least two days.

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica: 4.  Due to possibly nefarious reasons (the government lie, never!), society now relies on humans for food, leather/hair goods, and dairy products; our point-of-view character receives what is the wagyu beef of people and establishes a forbidden relationship with it. I feel some of the brutality was made more vicious by the translation, and while I don’t eat a lot of meat anyway, I have never thought about being a vegan so hard.

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin: 4.5. In a weird narrative structure that eventually makes sense, three women describe their experiences with powerful elemental sorcerers known as Orogenes, men and women who can move the very earth. I was initially thrown off by the way the story unfolds, but when I started putting it together it felt very rewarding and I loved the world building. 

The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James***: 3.5. Shea Collins has a day job, but you wouldn’t know it with the amount of time she spends writing her crime blog, and she’s just landed the whale: Beth Greer, an uber-wealthy old woman who was tried and acquitted of serial murder when she was in her early twenties. There were a few weird loose ends, but the ghost makes sense and the motives aren’t completely pulled out of thin air, so it’s a decent murder/ghost mystery.

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*All of Hester Fox’s work that I’ve read focuses on a heroine during a specific time period which varies but is always “Gothic” in tone. The protagonist is usually an outcast for some reason, and public opinion of her is not very high. There’s also a romance, and so far it’s all been with males who have a reason to be an insider. The ending is always at least sorta happy. Add some dark secrets and mix liberally with elements of the supernatural.

***From what I’ve read of Simone St. James, she blends the beats of crime mystery with a supernatural force in every book. Best of both worlds if you’re a true crime lover who just wants a ghost to pop up and testify now and then.